The interview: Benjamin Zephaniah

What is it that makes a middle-aged Rastafarian dub poet desert the city and divide his time between a remote Lincolnshire village and a flat in Beijing? The man who once turned down an OBE tells Lynn Barber about his traumatic childhood, his infertility, fear of old age - and why, at 50, he still feels like a child

Benjamin Zephaniah has lived in Birmingham, Jamaica, Newham, Egypt, Yugoslavia, South Africa, and now, at 50, divides his time between Beijing and a village near Spalding, Lincolnshire. It's the Spalding bit that I find incongruous. You just do not expect to find dreadlocked Rastafarian dub poets in Spalding, Lincs. Or maybe you do. I've never been there - maybe it's crawling with Rastafarian poets? But no, he assures me, he is the only one. I was going to visit him there but I had a cold and he said that, as a vegan, he has to avoid colds (something to do with having less mucus than carnivores) so I had to meet him later in London. We ended up in the stockroom of the wonderful Newham Bookshop, his London base and home from home, where, perched among boxes of books, he talked a storm and recited his poem Rong Radio. You can find it on his website, or on YouTube, but getting a private performance was one of the most thrilling experiences of my interviewing career.

When Zephaniah refused the OBE in 2003, several newspaper commentators took the line that he was ungrateful, refusing this crumb from the white man's table. He, of course, objected to the word "Empire" which he associated with slavery. (Why do they still use it? Apart from anything else, it looks so self-deluded.) He'd already published a poem, Bought and Sold, which expressed his contempt for black athletes and artists who could be bought with a gong. In the same poem he was equally disdainful of the poet laureateship - "Don't take my word, go check the verse / Cause every laureate gets worse" - but I hoped he might have changed his mind. He absolutely hasn't: "I just think it's one of those outdated things. Go on the streets here and ask people if they know who Benjamin Zephaniah is and what he does, and most of them will tell you. Ask them what Andrew Motion does and silence. It's irrelevant." He is not anti-establishment - he does tons of work for the British Council - but he wants no truck with royal flummery.

I made the mistake of asking why on earth he had moved to Spalding and suddenly his hackles were up, scenting racism. Why shouldn't he live in Spalding? "I was born in Britain, I've lived here all my life, I have the right to live anywhere I want to." Yes, of course. It's just that he always says he loves those multi-ethnic urban streets where you find a Mexican restaurant next to a Bangladeshi next to a Lebanese and I don't imagine you get much of that in Lincolnshire. Actually, he says, I'm wrong. Peterborough, which is the nearest big town, has as many different ethnic restaurants as Newham. And Boston, Lincs, is the most immigrated-to town in Britain - all the people who work on the land there are immigrants, though they are mainly eastern Europeans. But it is true, he concedes, that his particular village is not exactly rainbow nation. And although he has met some nice people, he doesn't have any close friends there. His mother and siblings all live in Birmingham, most of his friends are in London.

So why did he decide to move? Until last year he lived in Newham and always said he loved it. It's a question he still seems to be pondering himself, possibly with a hint of midlife crisis. "I felt that I had to move from the house I was living in, that's how I started. No - actually, I felt I had to decorate the house I was living in so I spent quite a lot of money decorating it, stepped back and thought, 'This is really nice. I've always wanted wooden floors.' And then I thought, 'But you know? I don't want to live here any more!' It was really strange - I just got the feeling that I had to move. And I've always loved the English countryside, and I thought to myself - I was 49 at the time - if you want to live in a small village, this is the time to do it. It always upsets me when I hear older people saying, 'I wish I'd done this, I wish I'd done that,' and it's too late. And there was a type of place that I wanted, where I could jog straight out into the countryside - I love jogging, I'm a health freak - far away from the motorway network. And a place came up in Spalding and it was ideal."

He has only twice encountered racism since he moved. One was a builder who was fine on the phone but then refused even to do an estimate when he met Zephaniah. Another - weirdly - was a man who put an ad in the local paper saying he collected old banknotes and wanted to buy them. Zephaniah rang him up and said he'd got some old Egyptian banknotes (he lived in Egypt at one stage) which he could have for free. So they agreed to meet in a pub and Zephaniah said, "You'll know me - I'm a black guy with dreadlocks." Whereupon the man said, "I don't do stuff with black people," and put the phone down.

Spalding is Zephaniah's base for about seven months a year; the rest of the time he lives in China. He was led to China originally by his love of martial arts: he wanted to train with the monks of the Shaolin temple in Henan province who he believes practise the purest form of kung fu. He loved it and returned every year till eventually he bought his own flat in Beijing. He has written his last three novels there, although they are all set in Newham.

Writing novels for teenagers seems to have taken over from writing poems for the past few years, and he admits that he feels "very embarrassed" about his lack of productivity. But poems either come or they don't. Sometimes he'll hear a phrase and think, "That could be a poem," and stop whatever he is doing to write it. Or actually not write it - he is too dyslexic. He composes it all in his head and memorises it. Sometimes poems come to him in dreams. "Rong Radio came to me at three o'clock in the morning - and it's a long complicated poem with lots of different rhythms in it - almost as though I'd been dreaming it. It sounds a bit airy-fairy but it's really true. I woke up and it was just there, the whole poem. That also happened with Naked. I think some of the best ones, it's like I've got to give birth to it. I can't sit down at the desk with a blank piece of paper. I'd much rather go and play football or run, just do something, and hope it will inspire me. You cannot force poetry, you cannot. But when I'm writing a novel, now that's different, I can sit down with a blank piece of paper and know I'm going to get from A to B. It takes over for a year or so and I find it very difficult to do anything else."

And he's always doing something - writing novels, plays, making records, radio programmes, working with musicians, doing poetry readings (he has a new tour starting in February). He also does a lot of unpaid work: campaigning for victims of injustice, or animal rights or whatever. In the past, he used to do beer commercials (although he doesn't drink) to fund his work with children in the South African townships, but now he doesn't need to. Although his income fluctuates from year to year, he knows he'll never starve. He has no mortgage, no major outgoings; "living all on my own, having nobody to love, nobody to spend money on - though I give a bit of money to my mum - I don't need much to live on." So he can afford to turn down work he doesn't fancy. He has twice refused to go on I'm a Celebrity, and Celebrity Big Brother, and, when asked to act in films, always insists on reading the whole script so, "if I'm the black man who walks in and says, 'Where's my deal, man? What's going down here?' I say no."

For someone who spent his teens in and out of approved school, borstal, prison (mainly for stealing), Zephaniah is almost absurdly respectable nowadays. His body is his temple. He doesn't drink, smoke, eat meat, use drugs (he says few Rastas do), doesn't have any vices. "I used to have this motto which was that at least once a day, every day, you should do something illegal. But now I can't find anything illegal to do, I can't get myself arrested! A policeman stopped me the other day and said, 'I saw you coming down the A1 and you were on a mobile phone.' I said, 'Search me then - I don't have a mobile phone.' And he saw me being so confident and said, 'Oh all right.' And then he goes, 'Are you the poet?' So you see - I can't even get framed any more!" But when he is stopped by the police, he insists on being addressed as Dr Zephaniah, which his 13 honorary doctorates entitle him to do.

The eldest of eight children - but only the eldest by minutes because he has a twin sister, Velda - he grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham. His mother was a nurse from Jamaica, his father a postman from Barbados. When he was nine his mother ran away from her husband, taking Benjamin but leaving the other seven children behind. It's still a touchy subject. His siblings, he says, hate him talking about it. "They say, 'Why are you washing our dirty linen in public? Dad wasn't such a bad man.' They think of him as a hero because he raised seven children all on his own. But my mum and I, we saw another side of him. When my mum left the house, she left because she felt her life was in danger - that's what she felt and that's what I saw. There was something my mum said to me once and I suppose it's true, that when my father started, the rest of the kids ran for shelter - they ran one way, but I ran towards my father, shouting 'Leave her alone!' So when he turned on my mother, he kind of turned on me, too. And I know when I ran out the door with my mother, we couldn't find the rest of the kids - they were all hiding in cupboards. So just me and my mum went. But listen - I went back to my primary school the other day, and my mother was in tears. She said that when she left the other kids, she used to come to the school gate and watch them playing, but know she couldn't get them. And that image, to me, was just so powerful - her at the gate, hiding, looking at her children."

Growing up with his mum, detached from his siblings, dyslexic, and often the only black boy in school, Zephaniah developed a love of animals that made him turn vegetarian at 11 and vegan at 13. "I didn't even know what the word meant. I just knew that I didn't want to eat animals - it was a real gut feeling. At the time I was in a school where I was getting so much racism, I found comfort in animals. A playground can be the loneliest place in the world when all the kids are playing and nobody will talk to you, so when a cat comes along, you play with the cat, you know? And then the cat comes again the next day and brings a couple of his friends, and you form a community. So that's where my love of animals started, and that was when I went vegetarian. And later on I decided that I just didn't want anything to do with any animal product." He is patron of the Vegan Society, and has written some great poems about animal rights, especially the one beginning, "Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas" which brings him a crop of extra royalties every Christmas - although he always makes a point of being out of the country then.

He first performed his poetry in church, aged 10, and by 15 was well known as a dub poet in Birmingham. But at 22 he decided he wanted a bigger pond and to perform to white audiences as well as black. So he went round the alternative comedy circuit in London, asking comedians such as Alexei Sayle if he could read a poem as part of their set - Dis Policeman Keeps On Kicking Me To Death always went down well. His first collection of poetry, Pen Rhythm, was published in 1980 and there have been six more since, as well as four novels for teenagers, six albums, numerous recorded readings and radio programmes, as well as all his work for the British Council.

In his great poem Naked, he says, "I do all dis stuff for my mother and she cries because I will not go to church." Is that still true? "Yes. I think deep down she wishes I could have been a good Christian boy but there's more to it than just that. In the poem it's a metaphor for many things - that I am trying to do something for my people, but I'm not conforming." His mother still worries that he hasn't got a proper job, but at least now she's stopped telling him to cut his dreadlocks and find a nice girlfriend - she has given up on that.

He married in his twenties but his wife left him after 12 years - "That was the worst thing that had ever happened to me" - and since then he has lived alone. "I love my independence, I love knowing that I can go anywhere without having to consult anybody. But I must admit - and this is a real personal dilemma and I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with it - that deep down my biggest fear is growing old alone. I always think that when you grow old you should have some companionship. I don't know how I'm going to square that circle." I don't know either. I get the impression he is very lonely. When I met him in Newham he said he'd just heard that a friend of his, an Urdu poet called Musarat Ahmed, was in hospital with throat cancer and he was going to visit her. Later, when I rang to thank him for the interview, he told me, almost in tears, that she had had her tongue removed. He talked about it at length and I was saying "How awful, how awful," but also thinking, how odd that he is telling me, a virtual stranger.

In Naked he talks about the pain of being childless - "I need babies to recite to/ I need babies to recite to me/ my life is full of lonely childless eternities/ where only poetry gives me life." He first suspected he was infertile as a teenager when "We were knocking about and not using condoms and everybody was getting pregnant left and right and centre but my girlfriends never did. So I just had this feeling and then at one point I thought, 'Right, let's go and get tested,' and they said 'You're infertile'. They said that part of me hadn't developed - the water's there but there's no sperm in it." In the mid-1990s he agreed to go on a programme about male infertility with Professor Robert Winston, hoping that Winston could make him fertile, but Winston confirmed that he had "no sperm count, absolutely none, and it's never going to happen". He consoles himself with the thought of the hundreds of children who write to him, who come to his readings in schools, who chat to him on the streets of Newham or wait for him outside the Newham Bookshop. "So that makes up for it - or that's what I tell myself anyway."

He gets on with children because he still thinks of himself as a child. He freaked out when he turned 50 in April and Saga sent him their magazine. "I couldn't believe I was 50. I still can't. And I don't allow my nephews and nieces to call me uncle - they call me Benji and I'm their mate. They tell me their problems, they tell me things they don't tell their mum and dad. I don't feel 50 - there's still something very childish or childlike inside me. I ride my bike like a kid you know, I love doing wheelies, I love climbing trees, I love exploring - I still love that stuff."

Lots of his friends, he says have "mellowed" - people who used to be in punk bands now talk about interest rates and whether the neighbourhood is going down. They tell him, "Benjamin, when you have a mortgage and children, you'll know what it feels like." But of course he never will have a mortgage and children, he never will mellow. "Because I've got to tell you really honestly, if you look at a lot of my work in the early days, there was stuff I was really angry about, and deep down I still am angry about it. OK, I'm not getting arrested by police in the way that I used to, but there's lots of things in the world that I'm still angry about. I just think: why can't people see the bigger picture and not just think about themselves?"